Sextures: An Academic Journal for Sexualities and Cultures is published by the Sextures Institute. The institute is an independent, strongly collaborative and supportive space for creative q***r thinking about sexualities and cultures free of the strictures and structures of neoliberal Academia. We are dedicated to challenging epistemic hegemonies and disorienting geopolitical centres. Our intelle
ctual tribe is all those q***r thinkers wondering in and out, and between, academic institutions and disciplines displaced by a university system that treats the production of knowledge as just another type of business. Whether you are in the Balkans, Eastern Europe, Africa, South and Central America, Asia, or in the margins in North America, Western Europe, Australia or New Zealand, Sextures Institute provides an alternative place for collaboration and excellence in scholarly research. Sextures Institute is an independent not-for-profit organisation established to conduct original multidisciplinary and integrative research in the lived cultures, histories and politics of sexuality, gender, ethnicity and class primarily, but not exclusively, in Central and Eastern Europe. It is strongly committed to the principles of intellectual and academic freedom, believing that le***an, gay, tr*******al, intersex and q***r people in a democratic society have the right to freely access, explore, enquire and express ideas and information regarding their lives from their own points of view, without fear of repression, vilification, job loss, censorship, or imprisonment. The institute and the journal provides a scholar-friendly, collaborative and creative platform for disadvantaged academics with limited access to academic resources, and marginalised by current national, regional, European and global neoliberal research funding arrangements, to connect, grow, collaborate and excel as researchers. It is for these reasons that the institute strives for independence from funding arrangements that reflect (geo)political, social, epistemic, economic, and cultural agendas that have very little to do with the communities which the institute studies or with the scholars who conduct these studies. Sextures Institute intends to use a more self-reliant funding mix with funds obtained from grants from Mandrake.ATM, memberships, donations, and fundraising activities, including crowdfunding. The main research focus of the institute is on an ambitious, and well-overdue, project of extensively documenting non-normative sexual cultures in socialist and post-socialist Eastern Europe through oral histories, affective geographies and ethnographic methods.
